It’s been a big week of change. On July 20, the British music industry moved swiftly to set out its priorities for new Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Yesterday, UK music industry groups welcomed the PM’s announcement of an additional 20% business rates cut for live music venues.
And yet there is still a long fight ahead for the creative industries, not least with the continuing ripple effect of AI. Here Music Week – in collaboration with Arts Council England – brings you this powerful excerpt from the new book Made in England: Art And Culture In Changing Times written by former Universal Music Group UK CEO/chairman and current CEO Of The Royal Society of Arts (RSA) David Joseph. Here, he issues a powerful rallying cry to protect Britain’s creative industries...
In 2025, Nick Cave stood in the O2 and watched Radiohead play to a crowd of 20,000. All around him, people were dancing, crying, holding each other. Writing about it afterwards, he reflected that what the crowd was responding to was not only the music, but also the courage of the performers. The sheer nerve it took to stand before that many people and offer up their souls. To declare, without apology: this is what we think. This is what we feel. This is who we are. And 20,000 strangers connected with that vision as if it were their own experience.
He called it ‘a reparative force’. Something that improves matters.
He wasn’t being poetic. He was being precise.
That is what art does. Yet right now, we are doing something, quietly and incrementally, to destroy it.
You know these moments yourself. The song playing through a speaker in an ordinary room that takes you somewhere you haven’t been in twenty years. A person, a summer, a version of yourself you’d almost forgotten: suddenly you are completely elsewhere. The book you stayed up until 3am finishing, heart going, because something in it knew you better than you knew yourself. The play where everyone stood up at the end, all at once, without anyone calling it, because something had happened in the room that needed to be acknowledged, and your body knew that before your brain did.
These are not small moments. They are the moments when we are most alive, most human, most connected to each other. And least alone.
Artists don’t choose to be artists. It is a wiring. It can be a gift, and it can be a burden, and most of the time it is both at once. They did not weigh up the options and settle on painting, theatre, or music. The work chose them. And let’s not forget the people who support that work: who run the theatres, the choirs, the libraries, the youth arts programmes. They chose to be near it, to give their professional lives to something they knew mattered.
We treat the creative industries the way we treat a mobile signal – assuming it’s there, assuming it works, only noticing when it drops. We cite the same names – you know the ones – in the same speeches, as proof that England is still a creative nation, still punching above its weight, still the envy of the world. And then we carry on defunding the soil those names grew out of.
We are entering a world where machines can write the report, draft the brief, schedule the meeting, and summarise what you missed. They are very good at this. What they cannot do – what no amount of processing power will produce – is stand before a crowd and offer up their souls. They cannot be undone by a painting. They cannot be wired into a song the way you are: the way it plays, and you are simply gone, back to somewhere you loved.
We cite the same names in the same speeches as proof that England is still a creative nation, still punching above its weight, still the envy of the world. And then we carry on defunding the soil those names grew out of
David Joseph
Those are human capacities. And like any capacity, they atrophy when we do not use them. They have to be practised. They have to be taught. They have to be, if you will forgive the word, funded.
The arts are not a luxury that we can turn to when everything else is settled. They are where we learn to be citizens. Where we learn to imagine lives that are not our own. Where a kid from an overlooked, underserved town discovers that someone, somewhere – maybe a hundred years ago, maybe on the other side of the world – felt exactly what she feels. That she is not strange. That she is not alone. That she matters.
You went into public life to do something. So here is the question you need to ask yourself: not whether you appreciate culture, not whether you can name the right buildings and the right artists, or talk about the creative industries’ economic multiplier effect, but whether you are willing to treat the funding of the arts as the serious public investment it is. Whether you are willing to fund the buildings. To stop rotating ministers through the brief so fast that nothing has time to take root.
We know how to build those creative spaces. We know how to fill them. We know what happens to people inside them.
The only question is whether you think that’s worth protecting.
I hope you do. Because the alternative is a society that has decided that none of this is a priority, that the market will provide, that culture is what happens after the serious work is
done. That society is not one I recognise, and I do not think it is one you want to be responsible for. It is not one I want for the generations coming up behind us.
Yours, in hope,
David Joseph
Made in England: Art and Culture in Changing Times — a new collection of essays and contributions from artists, writers, academics and cultural leaders, reflecting on everything eight decades of public investment in culture and creativity has achieved for our country. Illustrated by Chris Riddell, edited by Arts Council England and published by Comma Press. It is available at artscouncil.org.uk.
